Stearman build

Could flexing of either wing introduce aileron movement in the other wing with that parallelogram mechanism Kevin? Or is the linkage inboard enough not to have a detremental effect?

The interplane struts will be rigged and fixed so both wings incidence are locked - Ive made rigging jigs to hold enable this.

A day making rigging jigs is now paying off. This dry run shows the wing dihedrals and lateral positions are perfect but plumb lines from the upper to lower wing leading edges are + 6mm and - 6mm out. So rather than use the rigging to force the wings into line i’ll get my bastard file out (or should that be needle files) to make adjustments.

No flying at the moment so an opportunity to restart my Strearman build. Some time ago John Banister very kindly machined these discs to construct a plug to make the cowl.

Ive using a shaft mounted in the drill press to align the discs when gluing up

Not too bad to restart the build. Last post/effort was 12th April.

The layers are now glued up into front and rear halves. Because my lathe has not the capacity i've adapted my drill press to spin the plug for final finishing.

Now i'm out of the comfort zone Q - i need a separator (see the blue line ) between the front and rear plugs which will allow me to fill and sand the plugs but allow them to split cleanly - Any suggestions what i could use. (

You have created alignment with the bar through the middle, can’t you just bolt the two halves together, no separator required, or have I missed something?

Good to know you are back on the Stearman project, we have missed it. Gives me enthusiasm to get back on my Vampire project which has been neglected for so long that people (other than Simon Dean) have even given up asking me how it’s going!

Regards,
David

This is my plan in brief but not going into detail how i plan to make the moulds or use them to lay up the actual cowl.

I'm currently at stage 1 in attached pic but i need to fill sand polish the shape to a high standard to form perfectly mating front and rear moulds - as pic 2

but in order to produce the two halves with accurate square edges at the mid point join i need to be able to have a separator ( in blue ) because when I apply filler to the two halves, there will be fillets ( in red ) adjacent to the separator plate . Then i will split the two halves and rejoin without the seperator plate and smooth away the fillets as per pic 4.

The separator plate needs to be semi rigid, very smooth finish on both sides and waxed to allow easy removal - some form of smooth plastic maybe ?

Hope you've still got all your fingers Kevin. 'Elf 'n Safety would have produced a multi-page manual to stop you doing that with a drill press.

Well Brian, the H&S police havn't paid me a visit yet - so all good so far !

Now on the 5th cycle of primer filler and cut back - a few more to go yet before the plug can be used to produce a good mould.